Promoting Community by Thinking, and Acting, Globally

Colleges Benefit By Crossing Traditional Boundaries

“In the fall of the year, in the
fall of the year...The rooks went up with a raucous trill..” wrote American
poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay, noting how not just lust, but
love, must receive our pleased enjoyment and be retained “in little ways.”

I think of Millay’s gentle lines as
I sit among masses of assignments to read and masses of “médiatique”
(multiple-media-based) materials to consider on this first week-end that marks
the genuine, celestially-based season of fall.

I teach French language and culture
at institutions ranging from the community-interest-based to the private, but
mostly at the community college, where my interests and philosophies have lain
since at least the middle of the last century. When the “fall of the year”
begins at the private school where I work during the second week of August, I
begin to wonder if institutional schedules, like the news and even the sports
seasons that surround me, might have taken the new 21st Century
twist in time that has rendered us all at once season-less,
chronologically-insensitive, and urgent.

We are now approaching the six-week
mark in a 16-week college term at that private college, I realize, and most of
the community colleges where I travail have passed their “census dates” and are
marching into their second month of coursework, even though the Earth’s fall
season is just beginning. Indeed, football season has overtaken the end of
baseball, and my open water swimming is giving way to covered, chlorine-laced
short-course pools.

In France, the country whose
language I am using to educate students young and old, from adolescent into the
“very old age” of their 90’s, the celebrated “rentrée” is still in force, as it
is each year during most of September, when workers and students, artists and
educators all return from a month of “grandes vacances” that has been at once
relaxing, stimulating, re-generative, and provocative. In France, the current
weather is warm, in fact unseasonably so, and women wear straw hats and fine
voile instead of thick black suits, while the new young President Emmanuel
Macron calls for limits on pollution and renewed—if not continuing—efforts to
fight global warming and climate change, two of his clarion calls to action.

And here in the United States, the
global seems somehow to have turned local. For every cry at the recent United
Nations General Assembly meeting in New York, made by the 39-year-old Macron, at once
world-weary, vital, and importunate, the 71-year-old American President Donald
Trump has turned things inward, referring to hurricanes in Texas and Florida as
Macron cites the world, and pointing to the effects of “the Iran deal” upon the
United States, even as Macron sees the effects as being of worldwide
interest.

Some years ago, it was common to
call for people to “think globally” and “act locally.” I would like to imagine
that that is what some of our institutions and our country’s leader might be
doing, when focusing on us and on the small stuff. At the private college where
I work, studies in international film have become analyses of the influence of
American cinema upon the world, as the professoriate has shifted from the
travel-wise to the more conservative, and at at least one of the community
colleges where I work, “foreign” language study has dwindled to an option of
taking Spanish. No other alien tongues are offered in-person or online at that
place anymore.

By concentrating on the close-by, by
analyzing profoundly the simply proximate, students can indeed learn something,
I agree. But I must admit that, as it did with Edna St. Vincent Millay, this
sort of minimizing of our existence in the face of such maximizing forces as
climate shift and Kuyper Belt discoveries, archaeological finds and ethical
shifts, “(breaks) my heart in little ways.”

We at the community college are a
community of thinkers who should be imagining not just things futuristic but
broad, geographically and thoughtfully, mentally, physically, and emotionally, at
once ahead and into the past, across boundaries academic and philosophical,
practical and pecuniary. We must flex ourselves in response to our communities’
needs, but we must also lead.